Extreme beer: No accounting for taste

IT IS dawn on a crisp Friday morning in February 2010. On the sidewalk of a suburban street in Santa Rosa, California, a line of hooded young men shuffles towards a low-built blue building. A soup kitchen, you might think, or a drug rehabilitation centre.

But the hoodies aren’t harbouring the local down-and-outs. In the queue are hip 20 and 30-something young professionals from as far away as New York and even Europe. They are lining up for the fifth annual release of “Pliny the Younger”, an Indian pale ale (IPA) produced by Santa Rosa’s Russian River microbrewery. Last year’s batch sold out in a week. This year, all 40 kegs were gone within 8 hours, and the beer briefly became the highest-rated brew on the Beer Advocate website, a forum for lovers of craft beer.

Each to their own, you might say. What adds intrigue to the mix is that to most palates Pliny the Younger is really rather disagreeable. Its sky-high content of hops, the herb that imparts bitterness and aroma to a beer, is married to a sickly maltiness and an intense punch of alcohol that seem designed to make you turn up your nose at the first sip.

This is not an isolated case, either. While the likes of Budweiser, Miller and Coors continue to make their mass-market lagers lighter and blander, America’s craft beer industry is busily going the other way, cramming as much alcohol and hoppy bitterness into its beers as will fit. US brews with names such as Hop Stoopid, Hop Devil, Hopsickle, Hop Wallop, HopSlam and Hop Crisis proudly ...

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